


Loss and Gain

by Lacertae



Series: Soulmates [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Mentioned Tekhartha Mondatta, Minor Character Death, Other Ships Not Mentioned in Tags, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 09:23:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15167624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lacertae/pseuds/Lacertae
Summary: *(past) Mondatta/Zenyatta, hinted other ship* soulmate au. Omnics have soulmarks. Zenyatta's one is... not in a place he's ever thought to look, until someone else does it for him.





	Loss and Gain

**Author's Note:**

> just a quick drabble I wrote to get out of the writer block funk i'm in rn

**Loss and Gain**

 

Omnics have soulmarks.

They are not built with them, and many humans find this reason enough to denounce their presence, cast doubt on it, reject the meaning –that omnics have souls, just like humans do.

The marks appear somewhere on an omnic’s body and seem to have no particular rule, nor specific time –one day there is none, the next a mark is there, visible against polished metal, or maybe hidden behind cables, or etched over the curve of a piston.

Zenyatta’s soulmark is hidden underneath the panel on his lower back, the one he only opens to connect and port himself with computers and systems that he is otherwise unable to interface with. It is a place he cannot see by himself, and has rarely had any need to observe closely, so he does not know when the mark appears.

He does not find out for years and in fact, not knowing when it first appeared, it could be even longer. It could be decades.

Brigitte is the first who notices it.

She performs maintenance on Zenyatta bi-weekly ever since her arrival to OverWatch following Reinhardt, but usually her work is reserved for his servos and the connectors on his back, a wayward cable that gets truncated during sparring or a particularly dire mission.

And then, she decides to give him a complete check-up, from head to toe to the littlest sensor he owns, and this is how she finds it, tucked on the inside of his panel –it is a mark split in two, and her heart stutters as she observes it, the reality of how intimate this is only hitting her after she’s had enough time to recognise that one half of the mark is dark, black like charcoal, black like death.

“Zenyatta…?”

Something in her voice gives her away, makes Zenyatta realise something is wrong, because he looks down from where he’s sitting, but she refuses to look at him, licking her lips.

“Is there something wrong, Brigitte? Did I contract some horrible, terminally infective virus of which I had no idea?” a beat, then “or did you perhaps break something in your inspection?”

“Wh– no!” Brigitte looks up then, flustered and in denial, and meets his unchanging face plate, his forehead array blinking. “You jest, you know I would never!”

“Of course I jest, but your tone sounded troubled. What did you find?”

There is no way to just mention it casually –ask him why he never said anything, never mentioned how his soulmark is split, which isn’t as rare as people would like to make it to be, never mentioned how he even had one to begin with– so Brigitte opens her mouth, then closes it, and swallows.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says instead, heartfelt and pained, because she understands what it means, and wants Zenyatta to know she had not meant to pry, that she didn’t–

“Forgive me, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.” And he truly seems like he doesn’t, and for a moment Brigitte flounders, caught unprepared.

She’s staring at his soulmark, obviously, and he knows it, but he didn’t see fit to warn her not to look, and now he’s putting her on edge and he doesn’t even understand why she’s–

Except.

Brigitte looks down again at the mark, tucked neatly somewhere that would be difficult to look at, and possibly even more so for Zenyatta, and… and…

“You have a soulmark, here,” she says, and her voice takes almost a hollow tone.

There is a beat, and she can see the way he freezes, the tiniest jolt of his shoulders that betrays his surprise. Then, quietly, “… oh.”

“You did not know…?”

“… I… no, I did not. And I assume that by your words it means it’s…”

Eyes wide, Brigitte reaches out to grab Zenyatta’s hand before he can finish. “No! I mean… yes but… it’s– it’s a double, Zenyatta. Not all of it is black. Just… just one half.”

Another beat, this time longer. “Brigitte… could you perhaps… tell me what it looks like?”

She nods. “There is… I think it’s omnicode, I cannot read it. But…” she snatches a pen from the table near her head, and hastily draws the symbols on her dirty, sweat palm.

Brigitte doesn’t consider how this might be weird –painting on her own skin the marks of someone else should be blasphemous if she wasn’t so focused on showing Zenyatta what his own soulmark is, how private, how important this is– and then turns her wrist around, awkwardly, and pushes it in front of Zenyatta’s face plate. “This,” she points at one of her carefully copied symbols, “this one is black.”

It takes Zenyatta a long time to speak again, and when he does, it is not through words –he makes a small, broken sound, one unlike anything Brigitte has ever heard, like metal scraping against rock, and she flinches, yet she still holds his hand in hers, tightly, as she recognises the sound for what it is.

Pain.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats, and there is the same conviction and the same grief as before. It seems like he knows who the mark belongs… belonged to, and that seeing it made the pain flare up again. “Zenyatta, I’m so sorry. I’m here. I’m… I’m here.”

He feels his hand twitch in hers, and she lets go long enough that he can turn it around to grasp her own back, hard enough that it could hurt, only he is still mindful, even in his pain, so it stops just shy of aching.

Zenyatta makes a soft hiccup, garbled white noise, as his shoulders shake, then he stills, gathers himself again, and lets go of her hand.

“Please forgive me, Brigitte,” he says, his voice weirdly collected, lacking the usual emotion that makes it so pleasant to listen to. “I… I had not expected it would be…” he glitches again, another hiccup, and she nods, shushes him, and then raises up to her feet.

“Is it alright if I… ” it is awkward, almost, but Brigitte is a physical sort of person, and she knows he needs it.

When he nods, she wraps her arms around his shoulders and hugs him as tightly as she can, buries his face in her dirty work clothes, and knows that while he cannot cry, his soul is, experiencing loss all over again for someone she doesn’t know, though curiosity never even touches her mind.

“Thank you.” His voice is quiet, but Brigitte hears him nonetheless.

She doesn’t ask what the symbols mean, who they represent. She doesn’t think ‘at least the other one is alive, at least you only lost one’ because she knows it’s not true –one loss is still one loss, it’s still someone who died, who’s lost forever, and Zenyatta will never have them back ever again… but she thinks about the other symbol, golden in colour, thinks about how it means Zenyatta has met them already, thinks about how he has someone waiting for him, someone who will love him, and feels tears fill her eyes as she blinks them away.

It is bittersweet, gaining and losing so much at the same time.

She thinks about her own soulmark, carved on her side, just under her waist. Thinks about how it remained grey for all her childhood, how she spent years wondering about it, worrying about what it would mean if it ever turned golden, only to find it changed after she joined OverWatch.

She thinks about how many choices she has, and refuses to think about what it could have been to see two, only to have one taken away.

She thinks about how Reinhardt congratulated her when she told him about it, how her dad reacted when she called him to share the news, her mom’s happy babbles as she pushed him away from the phone to congratulate her .

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says again, and weeps quietly for Zenyatta, who remains quiet in her arms, his hands trembling as they hold on her shirt.

There is one golden symbol Zenyatta has left, but for now, they both mourn.


End file.
